Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (25 page)

passed fourteen
sous
for the four-pound loaf by the spring of 1789 and at

times was absorbing as much as 88 percent ofthe average worker’s salary.

In the provinces, the towns and peasant communities, traumatized by the

fear of famine, fought to preserve local stores of grain; riots erupted in mar-

ketplaces, and millers and bakers were assaulted; and grain was often seized

on the roads. The most serious disturbances before the events of the sum-

mer occurred in March and April in Flanders, Provence, Franche-Comté,

Dauphiné, Languedoc, and Guienne. At Versailles, Necker, bedeviled by

the subsistence crisis as well as by the sociopolitical impasse, had to spend

the straitened government’s precious currency and credit to import grain,

subsidize merchants at Paris and elsewhere, establish workshops for the

unemployed and hungry in the capital, and pay troops supervising the

transport ofgrain through the countryside. Government and people alike

were adversely affected by the grain crisis.86

These economic difficulties alone would have furnished ample incentive

for the craftsmen, shopkeepers, and laborers of Paris and other communi-

ties to intervene in the constitutional and social wrangles oftheir betters.

Yet other forces were also inclining them in that direction. Some of those

forces, intriguingly, were elitist and ideological in origin. Competing ele-

ments within the dominant classes at Paris took to appealing to the populace

during the “Prerevolution” with published and verbal attacks against each

other and with shrill antiministerial invocations ofliberty and social justice.

The skilled workers and shopkeepers whom history would soon know as

the
sans-culottes
developed early on the habit ofchampioning one courtier

faction against another, one institution (such as the Paris Parlement) against

another (such as the government itself), and so by 1789 were already

psychologically prepared to break into the arena ofpolitics.87

Hence, as all the world knows today, news ofthe king’s dismissal of

Necker and several other ministers in the second week ofJuly 1789 ignited

a popular insurrection at Paris whose climactic event, the seizure ofthe

Bastille on the fourteenth, ensured (at least for the time being) the triumph

85 Doyle,
Origins of the French Revolution
, pp. 160–67.

86 On Necker’s handling ofthe subsistence crisis in his second ministry, see Harris,
Necker
and the Revolution of 1789
, esp. pp. 273–74 and 544–59.

87 See George Rudé,
The Crowd in the French Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); and
Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Viking, 1973).

The descent into revolution

99

ofprogressive elitists over reactionary elitists in the sociopolitics ofthe

realm. Rather than telling yet again the gripping story ofwhat happened in

Paris and in the other communities ofthe realm, we need to account in broad

analytical terms for the municipal upheavals of 1789 and evaluate their

significance in helping to launch France irreversibly upon its momentous

revolutionary adventure.

The municipal revolution in the summer of1789, it is crucial to remem-

ber,
was
a nationwide phenomenon, more dangerous to the authorities than

an uprising confined to Paris would have been. We know today that at least

twenty ofthe thirty communities in the kingdom vaunting populations of

twenty thousand or more saw the formation of revolutionary committees

during the latter halfofJuly, to be followed by six additional towns in

August. To be sure, Grenoble and Lille claimed such impromptu institu-

tions for just a few days in July, while Toulouse and Clermont-Ferrand

never had them at all. Yet, even though a few municipal administrations

rode out the period essentially unaltered, most ofthem witnessed major

changes ofone kind or another during the summer of1789.88 They did so

because urgent political and economic issues, though we know them best

in connection with the pivotal insurrection at Paris, were truly national in

character.

Four factors, it has been argued, were especially influential in deter-

mining the extent ofchange in a given municipality: the structure ofits

economy and society; the recent politics ofits ruling elite; the problems

it experienced in the economic crisis; and the closeness ofits ties with

other towns. Ofthese four variables, the first was the most important; yet

all four tended to work together to limit the political options available in

each town. Major change was least likely in administrative centers whose

ruling elites had either stood up to the crown or opened their ranks in

1787–88, in which prices did not continue to climb throughout 1789, and

that were not in close contact with centers ofrevolutionary agitation. On

the other hand, revolution was
most
likely in manufacturing, military, and

naval communities. Committees particularly claimed power “where rul-

ing elites had refused to open their ranks, especially during the meetings

to elect deputies to the Estates General; where prices rose steeply in 1789

(the north); and where the local leaders ofthe revolution had close contacts

with other revolutionary centers.” In a somewhat special category were

commercial and (notably) port towns that displayed ambivalent political

leanings in 1789. Their committees seldom took complete control unless

they faced ruling elite intransigence. They often enjoyed optimum access

to sources of foreign grain and so avoided the steepest price rises afflicting

88 Consult Lynn Hunt, “Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National

Revolution in 1789,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
18 (1976): 324.

100

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

interior communities. And even though their merchants profited from con-

nections with counterparts within and outside France, the leaders ofsuch

towns were much less subject to the revolutionary influences emanating

from Rennes, Dijon, or even Paris, than were the leaders of the smaller

hinterland towns.89

Because ofits unique status, Paris did not in all respects fulfill the crite-

ria for revolutionary upheaval adduced on these pages. Nonetheless, it is

easy to see why the capital, with its politicized judges,
officiers
, and men ofletters, its inflexible governing elite, its huge subsistence problems, and

its exposure to the rumors (and eventual reality) ofcounterrevolutionary

measures coordinated at nearby Versailles, should have exploded in July. It

is, furthermore, easy to understand why so many other cities and villages

across France, which
did
more or less satisfy these revolutionary require-

ments, should also have revolted. And the brawn in most ofthese uprisings

was provided by small shopkeepers, artisans, journeymen, and unskilled

toilers, some ofwhom had participated in the spring in the politicizing

tasks ofelecting deputies to the Estates General and drafting protests to the

king, and all ofwhom must have harbored throughout 1789 fears of

starvation, aristocratic plots, and foreign invasion.90

With the kingdom’s teeming capital lost to its king, then, and with other

cities and towns, like Paris, setting up insurrectionary committees, forming

citizen militias, and obeying only such orders from the National Assembly

as sorted with their own local political and economic concerns, power

during July–August 1789 began to slip from its old moorings. It began

to shift, in other words, from Louis XVI to Necker, from ministers and

intendants to Assemblymen, from conservatives to progressives inside the

Assembly – and even, to some extent, from the Assembly itself to local

municipalities. But this historic transference of power only affected the

majority of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in meaningful fashion with the

advent ofthe peasant upheaval in high summer.

At Versailles, as we have seen, the king remained, even in the wake of

his reverse in July, fundamentally opposed to the agenda of the victorious

Patriots. But for the latter as well as for their conservative foes, the tendency

toward social disorder in both urban and rural France in the wake ofthe

July Days posed a genuine dilemma. True, the progressives in the National

Assembly were determined to maintain their recent gains. On 14 July the

Assembly declared that the king’s ministers would be held criminally li-

able for any actions contravening legislative decrees or the nation’s rights.

Moreover, the deputies ringingly reaffirmed their proclamations of 17, 20,

89 Ibid., pp. 327, 328–29.

90 On the elections to the Estates General, refer to the papers by Franc¸ois Furet and Ran Halévi in Baker, ed.,
Political Culture of the Old Regime
. On the beliefs of the townspeople in 1789, see Lefebvre,
Coming of the French Revolution
, esp. chap. 6.

The descent into revolution

101

and 23 June; set about drafting a declaration of rights and a constitution;

and on 21 July ratified Siéyès’s assertion that “all public powers without

exception are an emanation ofthe general will, all come from the people,

that is to say, the Nation.”91 On the very next day, however, the sudden

lynching in Paris oftwo royal officials, Foullon de Doué and his son-in-law,

Bertier de Sauvigny, accused ofinvolvement in schemes to hoard grain, re-

minded the delegates ofthe atrocities to which at least some of“the people”

could be driven. Yet even more ominously, in July and early August

the Assemblymen were deluged with letters sent in from provincial France,

painting an alarming picture oftowns and villages menaced by aristocratic

plotters and “brigands” and appealing for governmental assistance against

such social malefactors.92 Disorder, in other words, was spreading through

provincial and rural France, and was about to ascend to one ofits revolu-

tionary climaxes in the peasant “chain-reaction” panic known to history

as the Great Fear.

Any attempt to explain the upheaval ofthe French peasantry in the

summer of1789 must reckon with long-term, structural factors as well

as with the immediate economic difficulties we have already discussed.

A structural analysis might well begin with the observation that peasant

revolts like those of1789 inhered naturally in an agrarian social struc-

ture characteristic ofFrance (and ofwestern regions ofa yet to be united

Germany) in eighteenth-century Europe. Despite sundry constraints im-

posed by the seigneurial regime, French peasants controlled usage ofmuch

more ofthe arable land than did the increasingly enserfed peasantry of

eastern Europe or the dispossessed lower classes ofrural England. What

is more, France’s peasant communities, which had been shaped through

long centuries ofstruggle for administrative autonomy and economic se-

curity, had by the eighteenth century emerged as formidable competitors

with their lords for local agrarian rights and influence. It is noteworthy

that the government played a central role in this process – as it did in so

much else in French history. As it penetrated into each locality, the statist

administration gradually pushed the seigneur aside, leaving him as only the

“first subject ofthe parish,” wielding little more than judicial powers over

a peasantry subject to the authority ofno one but the intendant and his

subdelegate. The village assemblies consequently could still function, and

frequently did, as forums for the discussion of local affairs by all heads of

families; but they did so under the umbrella of state absolutism.93

It is possible to take this “structuralist” approach to the gestation of

peasant revolution in 1789 even further. One could argue that it was the

91 Harris,
Necker and the Revolution of 1789
, pp. 576, 601.

92 Tackett,
Becoming a Revolutionary
, p. 169.

93 Skocpol,
States and Social Revolutions
, pp. 118–21.

102

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

emergence ofa bureaucratic state in France and the integration ofthe village

into that state which gave the peasant community a robust self-image and

the confidence to challenge its seigneur as it had never challenged him be-

fore. Displaying this new confidence rather than responding to any novel

“class” demands on the part ofits lord, the rural village tapped the bur-

geoning talents ofthe legal profession to launch a withering critique not

only ofspecific seigneurial rights but, indeed, ofthe historical and moral

legitimacy ofseigneurial authority itself.94 Whether one chiefly emphasizes

here the paternalistic role ofthe absolutist state or the (limited) autonomy

ofpeasant communities, the psychological readiness ofthe peasantry to

perform an active role in the politics of 1789 seems as evident as does that

ofthe Parisians and ofFrench townsfolk in general.

So structural as well as economic realities lay behind the peasant up-

heaval ofJuly–August 1789. But their impact was reinforced enormously